IS Arabic language teaching app

Guardian, Islamic State releases children's mobile app 'to teach Arabic', 11 May 2016 "The app called Huroof – meaning alphabet or letters in Arabic – has ‘tank’, ‘gun’ and ‘rocket’ among the vocabulary taught."

Arabic manuscripts from J'lem libraries to go online

Jerusalem Post, Arabic manuscripts from J'lem libraries to go online "The Arabic Manuscripts Digital Library of Jerusalem, which was inaugurated last week at ceremonies in Jerusalem and Ramallah, will see the development of an online platform showcasing collections from the Khalidi Library, the Budeiri Library, Al-Aksa Library, Al- Ansari Library and the Wakf Restoration Center in the Old City. The project’s stated goal is to “promote the written heritage of east Jerusalem and to make this heritage accessible to all with the sole caveat of an Internet connection.”"

Storify Arabic version

The Next Web, Storify working with Middle Eastern initiative Taghreedat to translate the site into Arabic, 

"Storify has recently announced that it will be working in cooperation with Taghreedat to translate its interface into Arabic."

7 Arabic Tools From Microsoft Afkar

arabcrunch.com, 7 Arabic Tools From Microsoft Afkar Innovated by Cairo Microsoft Innovation Lab useful review. Maren Morph looks handy for specialists.

"Maren Morph is a powerful, highly-accurate and comprehensive Arabic morphological analyzer, made to help Arabic users enrich their Arabic language experience."

‘Arabizi is destroying the Arabic language’

Just picked up this one up (a little late) via eAraby

Renad Ghanem, ‘Arabizi is destroying the Arabic language’, 19 April 2011

"Most Arab Internet users find this way easier than typing in Arabic. Teachers fear that this will weaken their Arabic language ability or even replace the language in the future. Arabic professional professors from the Arab world consider it a war against the Arabic language to make it disappear in the long run."

Other opinions are also presented in the article.

Protecting Arabs Online

VOA, Protecting Arabs Online « Digital Frontiers " ... the nonprofit Access Now – a loose group campaigning for expanded online freedom and access – has released new report designed to protect pro-democracy activists in the Arab world. “Protecting Your Security Online” comes in both Arabic and English versions, and includes many ideas and pointers for anyone wanting to protect their online activities from prying eyes."

Info: Accessnow.org

2nd edition of Arab Media Outlook

bikyamasr.com, New report looks at digital media in Arab world, 10 Mar 2011"A report detailed in a press release on Sunday said that digital media in the Arab world will continue to move forward as a result of the youth in the region. According to the Arab Media Outlook report published by the Dubai Press Club, North Africa is leading the digital move toward news and media."

Here's the report: Dubai Press Club & PWC's 2nd edition of Arab Media Outlook [pdf]. It runs to a couple of hundred pages, so needless to say I haven't read it yet!

alyaban.net

As I'm presently in Japan, I've been finding out a little more about resources useful to readers to this blog. One in particular is alyaban.net. This is a project promoting news from a Japanese perspective. It is linked to the Sasakawa Middle East Islam Fund. The news and commentaries are regularly updated, and can be obtained via RSS.

Islamic Studies Pathways - an Academic Guide to Islamic Studies Resources on the Internet

Islamic Studies Pathways - an Academic Guide to Islamic Studies Resources on the Internet: the old url is no more. Please point your browsers to Islamic Studies Pathways' more recent home (linked here). It is also linked directly into virtuallyislamic.com. Islamic Studies Pathways has been running since 1996, and was the foundation for much of my subsequent research. There will be a major update next year.

Majaliss vol. 4

Majalis: CD cover 

UNESCO, UNESCO Digital Library Majaliss continues to expand, 11 Nov 2010 "UNESCO's Rabat Office launches the fourth Volume of Majaliss, the Digital Library of classical Arabic literature. Accessible online and on CD-ROM, Majaliss offers free access to hundreds of books in the public domain, thus illustrating the innovative use of ICT for learning."

Edufina

StartUpArabia, Edufina: A University Research Portal For The Arab World, 13 Oct 2010 "Edufina is a newly launched startup that aims to fill in an empty space providing comprehensive, accurate and up-to-date information about universities around the Arab world."

Details: edufina.com

Looks useful.

Cool tool: Yamli Transliteration Application

Mohamed Marwen Meddah, startuparabia.com, Yamli Transliteration Application Launched For iPhone And iPad, 4 Oct 2010 "Yamli, the startup that specializes in smart transliteration technologies for the Arabic Web, just unveiled its new official iOS application for the iPhone and the iPad, bringing their technology to their users while on the move on their mobile phones and tablets."



Details: iTunes: Yamli

Check out the startuparabia review for more info.  The app looks like $2.99 well spent (haven't downloaded it yet).

If you haven't seen it, also check my recent piece on apps which appears in Cyber Orient.

"Learn Arabic with Maha"

alarabiya.net, Palestinian-Italian launches online Arabic lessons, 8 Sep 2010 "Maha Yacoub, a Palestinian-Italian living in the city of Livorno on the western coast, starting her teaching career with private tutoring then moved to the video sharing website YouTube where she launched the channel "Learn Arabic with Maha.""

See Maha's blog Learn Arabic with Maha, and here's her YouTube channel

Arabic language issues

BBC News - Reading Arabic 'hard for brain', 4 Sep 2010 "The University of Haifa team say people use both sides of their brain when they begin reading a language - but when learning Arabic this is wasting effort."

eKayf

ArabCrunch, eKayf: The Arabic eHow that We Need, 16 Aug 2010 "Low quality English content might be a true case for eHow, but for the Arabic Internet, there is no content to start with. Thats is why a startup like eKayf which is a copy of eHow but in Arabic is very useful, at least there is now some Arabic content that has some editor behind it rather than content coming from Forums as 90% of that content has no real value, the prof is that most of the time google returns wrong results for many Arabic keywords."

Check it out foryourself: eKayf

Useful info there, and a user-friendly format.

d1g.com

David George-Cosh, The National, Jordan portal to dig into Arabic social networking, 22 June 2010 "A Jordanian web portal is planning to tap into the social networking phenomenon by giving its users the tools to create their own version of Facebook.

"The move by d1g.com is designed to boost the amount of Arabic content online. It is estimated that only 1 per cent of all online content is in Arabic, despite there being about 300 million native speakers around the world."

According to my screenshot, cats would appear to be prominent on the mind of d1g.com users today:

Bookmarking tools

Mohamed Marwen Meddah, startuparabia.com, Revisiting Arabic Social Bookmarking And Content Discovery, June 23, 2010, "A bit over two years ago, I wrote a post about the Arab social bookmarking services out there, listing the existing options, how good they looked and how well they seemed to be doing, identifying the top ones at that time.

"If anyone were to pull up that same list today and go check on each one of the sites, they’d find that some have shut down, others have become useless and spam ridden, some others have become pretty much inactive, and only one or two are still holding on. What’s clear though is that these social bookmarking services never caught on with Arab web users, and never achieved their founders’ initial dreams for them."

Useful overview of Arabic tools.

tweetmeme Arabic

arabcrunch.com, Retweet Button Now Multi Lingual And Translates Retweeted Stories In Many Languages Including Arabic! nice idea, but arabcrunch notes there are some content/tech issues re. google translation (nothing new there then!).

"Tweetmeme has been an innovative startup, its Retweet button that allows people to Retweet any story ( repost to their Twitter stream) has been installed according to the company by over 200,000 websites ( we are one of them.)"

ICT in Arab world

David Morgan, globalarabnetwork.com, Towards Information Society - National e-Strategies in the Arab World, 5 June 2010

"The report, National e-Strategies for Development Global Status and Perspectives 2010, highlights the varying stages of development in the adoption of ICT across the Arab World."

See ITU, E-Strategies/ICT Strategies which links to the pdf: "The report National e-Strategies for Development, Global Status and Perspectives, 2010 is a publication in the framework of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the WSIS’s Tunis phase and the adoption of the Tunis Agenda for Information Society. The Report reviews the progress in the elaboration of comprehensive, forward-looking and sustainable national e-strategies, and makes recommendations on policies and measures. This includes ICT strategies and sectoral e-strategies as an integral part of national development plans and poverty reduction strategies, as was called for by the Tunis Agenda for the Information Society."

Arabic net

BBC News, 'Historic' day as first non-Latin web addresses go live, 6 May 2010 "Arab nations are leading a "historic" charge to make the world wide web live up to its name.

"Net regulator Icann has switched on a system that allows full web addresses that contain no Latin characters."

Also see ICANN blog, First IDN ccTLDs now available "Today the first three production non-Latin top-level domains were placed in the DNS root zone. This means they are live! Here is one newly enabled domain with a functional website that works right now: وزارة-الأتصالات.مصر